A conference event is typically provided by a conferencing system and used to allow a host to have one or more individuals participate in an event. The conference event may allow the individuals to actively participate during the event, or may only allow the individuals to passively participate by merely listening or viewing the event. While conference events are typically used for business activities, conference events can be used for social networking, including professional networking
Social networking has become a supplemental form of communication between individuals and communities. Many different forms of social networking use text, voice, video, or avatars to facilitate web and mobile-based communication, including instant messaging, image sharing, e-mail, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), Internet forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, video, social bookmarking, wall postings, music sharing, and other forms. For example, individuals can participate in web-based collaborative projects such as Wikipedia®, blogs such as Twitter®, content communities such as YouTube®, social networking such as Facebook® and LinkedIn®, virtual game worlds such as World of Warcraft®, and others. Existing conferencing technologies range from real-time instant messaging to multipoint conferencing and allow on-line users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks. However, the existing technologies are not cost effective and do not allow the simultaneous sharing of text, voice, video, and avatars using real-time multipoint conferencing for social networking. Further, the existing technologies typically use a pre-pay, fixed-fee, or per-use billing method.